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schliz writes "The White House has released four custom modules for the Drupal content management system. The modules address scalability, communication, and accessibility for disabled users, and the release is expected to benefit both the Drupal community and the WhiteHouse.gov site as the code is reviewed and improved by the open source community." Reader ChiefMonkeyGrinder adds an opinion piece with a somewhat envious view from the UK: "Open source is treated as something akin to devil-worshipping in some parts of government. So, the idea that a major project in the government backyard would be based on something as basic as Drupal is pretty far-fetched. No, this side of the Atlantic would have involved a closed-tender process; a decision made [behind] closed doors based on proprietary software and we'd be completely in the dark about costs, about delays, and about functionality."

Well, the mantra of communism is "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." That's... pretty much exactly how open source works. Everyone sees the benefits regardless of how much work they put into it, whether that be designing the architecture the system, writing code, submitting bug reports, or even just submitting crash reports.

With the one significant difference of OSS being "From each according to his abilities, if he feels like it, or is redistributing modified binaries, to each according to his needs if something matching his needs happens to be available, and because the provider of that something voluntarily made it available.

The difference between being voluntary(yes, BSD trolls, people are legally compelled to release their modifications if they distribute binaries from GPLed source; but they take on this contractual obligation voluntarily) and being a command-and-control scheme is not insignificant.

Looked at in a slightly different light, OSS development is basically a variation on the "consortium development" model, adjusted for the fact that, since duplicating data is virtually free, lawyers and restrictions to prevent free-riding are actually more expensive than free-riders are. BSD-style OSS makes no legal effort to rein-in free riding, either ignoring the issue or depending on the fact that maintaining your own fork is often more of a POS than staying up with the mainline, while GPL-style OSS makes no legal effort to go after free-riding users; but does seek to compel free-riding developers to contribute.

The handy thing about it is that, because it does have a slightly communistic flavor, it works for and appeals to your idealistic sharing hippie types; but, as experience has demonstrated, it is surprisingly compatible with capitalist incentive structures(just look at how much kernel development gets done, basically because large corporations find it profitable), and it involves basically zero state coercion, aside from legal enforcement of voluntary private contracts. Thus, it is largely agreeable to everyone from communists to libertarians, with the exception only of rent-seeking corporatist scum.

I've always wondered what would happen if I took an Open sourced project and used it in a closed source solution of my own. The only way I'd come under legal threat is if the Open Sourced community notices me, and I figure there are some weird loopholes in copyright law that I could mandate that no one be allowed to view my source.

Depends: If BSD, nothing(so long as you followed any attribution requirements).

If GPL, nothing, unless you distributed your proprietary binaries, at which point you would be legally obligated to offer the recipients of those binaries access to the source for no more than reasonable costs of reproduction(this is a common misconception: lots of outfits comply with the GPL just by slapping a zipped source bundle on an FTP server somewhere, just to save the hassle; but your legal obligation is only to recipi

See the various busybox lawsuits, where they found strings related to the busybox source in various products. I believe you can be compelled to show your source code in response to a subpoena, but it won't necessarily become public record.

It also scares me that you think there could be "some weird loopholes in copyright law." If you don't know what copyright does for you, why the heck are you in a creative industry? Go! Read! Learn how copyright works and how and why the GPL works within it.

The difference is so fundamental, I can't even believe this "question" comes up.

Yes, it is unfortunate that people seem to conflate voluntarily helping people and trying to better society through charitable acts with socialism.

To your other point, yes all governments compel using force it is just a matter of degree and for what purposes. The Constitutional Democratic ideal is simply to minimize that coercion and maximize personal freedom. Where the socialist ideal says that freedom is a false promise rarely realized and all must be compelled to the maximum extent to better society.

Well, the mantra of communism is "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." That's... pretty much exactly how open source works.

Well, except for that "small bit" of difference between enforced_by_the_government and given_voluntarily. It's sort of like the government telling you that you must build your neighbor's house, and you volunteering to help him out because he needs the help. Other than that, it's exactly the same....

Oh, for Pete's sake. The progressives/liberals name call on this site on a daily basis. There's probably close to 50 posts a day denigrating Christians, Republicans, conservatives of any stripe, etc... and they aren't modded as trolls every time they appear, even though many of them are gratuitous examples of intolerance and hatred of opposing points of view. The double standard exhibited here is incredible, especially as it comes from the group of people who preach tolerance to the point that tolerance

And yet Free Software's virtue of allowing users to maintain or hire anyone to maintain their software, make it the freest market. So you've got free market communism in one corner, competing with proprietary software's central-planned-economy capitalism.;-)

Well, the mantra of communism is "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." That's... pretty much exactly how open source works. Everyone sees the benefits regardless of how much work they put into it, whether that be designing the architecture the system, writing code, submitting bug reports, or even just submitting crash reports.

Well no, it fails on the "from each" part. There are plenty of users who could contribute to an open source project, but don't. It's not a perfect analogy, but the gist of it is that the Open Source movement doesn't require (or need) every capable person to contribute. But under a Communist system, it's assumed that everyone is contributing to the best of their abilities. (The question of motivating people is left to the reader.)

If you need an image manipulation tool that is functionally similar to Photoshop, there's GIMP. It fills the needs of people who don't need Photoshop specifically, but do need advanced image editing. And GIMP fills that need for free, which is a nice bonus. You can likewise arrange to purchase

And that's ignoring the fact that Marxism childishly assumes all economic transactions are zero-sum and wealth can never be created.

Where did you dig up that nonsense? Yes, communism consistently fails because it never manages to come up with a viable alternative to the market for setting prices and distributing commodities. However, there is nothing in Marxism implying that transactions are zero-sum. Marx himself, in his sections on economics, is practically orthodox Adam Smith. He is completely in agreement with Smith's stuff about gains from specialization of labor(the famous Pin Factory) and was, if anything, even more fixated on the productivity advantages of capital goods, and the way in which capital goods could be combined with labor to produce a surplus with which to produce more capital goods. The only real difference was that he took the (wholly orthodox) notion that "In a competitive market, the price of a commodity is equal to its marginal cost of production" combined that with the (also wholly orthodox) idea of "labor as commodity", and drew the unpleasant conclusion that "in a competitive market, the price of labor will be equal to the cost of bare subsistence for the laborer."(and, given what the pre-welfare-state industrial slums looked like, this wasn't exactly without empirical validation)... The whole marxist idea of labor being oppressed by capital rested on this conclusion, and on the idea(explicitly opposed to the "zero-sum" notion) that capital + labor would generate surplus value; but that, since the market for unskilled industrial labor was extremely competitive, capital would end up holding basically all the surplus value, reinvesting it in capital goods, and obtaining even more surplus value in the next round, while labor would always be stuck at a subsistence level.

Later Marxists were fascinated with(and frequently sought to emulate) to work of industrialist innovators like Ford and Taylor, precisely because they recognized that those guys where on the cutting edge of non-zero-sum transactions and maximal productivity gains from the combination of capital and labor with scientific management techniques.

Obviously, none of this denies the existence of random pot-smoking dorm-room "communists" who wear Che shirts and think that "work is slavery, man!"; but the intellectual underpinnings of Marxism and communism(as well as the activities of communist states, which tended to explicitly emphasize the swiftest possible transition from near-zero-sum subsistence activities to high-surplus industrial ones) is actually in nearly complete agreement with orthodox capitalist theorists about the non-zero-sumness of transactions, and the gains from trade and specialization of labor. Communists just don't like how those gains are distributed. Unfortunately for them, they never hit on a more viable mechanism.

The only real difference was that he took the (wholly orthodox) notion that "In a competitive market, the price of a commodity is equal to its marginal cost of production" combined that with the (also wholly orthodox) idea of "labor as commodity", and drew the unpleasant conclusion that "in a competitive market, the price of labor will be equal to the cost of bare subsistence for the laborer."

One overlooked fact is that, in a competitive market with low labor costs, the cost of goods is driven down too, which effectively makes the poor richer. (i.e., they get more for their dollar.) This has led to the modern phenomenon of the overweight poor person who has a cell phone, TV, and other previously-expensive products.

That's not meant as an attack, by the way. I myself am an overweight middle-class person with a smartphone, HDTV, and other previously-really-expensive products.

And that's ignoring the fact that Marxism childishly assumes all economic transactions are zero-sum and wealth can never be created.

There is an equally childish school of thought that grabbing up whatever you can get your hands on is no crime, since you must by definition have "earned" it and therefore are entitled to it. Both extremes are wrong.

Funny and ironic. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Obama administration has brought a lot of technology geeks into government. Not entirely by design: many were volunteers for his campaign that found that they'd been too fired up by winning the election to go back to their old jobs.

Why is this ironic? Because tech geeks do not tend towards socialist ideologies. If anything, they tend towards hyper-libertarianism. An ideology that's just as detached from the real world as anything Karl Marx dreamed up, b

Agreed. I have many, many complaints about this administration, but at least they're saving some amount of money by utilizing Drupal instead of some proprietary CMS system that might go out of business at any time.

At the same time, on more important life and death issues (such as war and threats of war, health care, trillions for corporations while citizens go hungry, civil liberties) this administration shares a lot in common with the previous administration, an administration that even former supporters grew to dislike. In my congressional district people know that trillions on occupation hurts us at home in many ways. Drupal code contributions can't measure up to the impact of keeping that much money in our coun

If anyone is basing their decision on who should be the leader of the world's largest economy/military/nuclear stockpile based on whether they use Drupal for their website and release any source their team creates, then... FAIL.

HR 3590 [senate.gov] is indeed 2,074 pages long, but if you actually go look at the document yourself (really, please do), you'll see that after the actual bill begins on page 15, there are only 25 or so lines of text per page, set in a big font, and the margins and line numbering consume about 40% of the width of the page. Don't let misleading talking points stick in your head.

Open Government would show action behind words. Instead, we're subjected to more of the secretive subterfuge that we all had gotten used to during the Bush years. Secret meetings, closed documents, short review periods before votes on multi-thousand page legislation.

Actually, Obama did pretty well with forcing open discussion of the healthcare legislation, even if most of the Republicans refused to actually do much more than recite rehearsed talking points. What's interesting is if you follow the links to the Drupal conference presentation it shows how they added webcams so you can see and hear meetings happening in the Whitehouse, obviously not all of the rooms, but still a huge step towards opening things up. The same goes for publishing data.

Hmmm, let's check President Obama's record after just a year in office, okay?

-- stopped a depression in its tracks and converted it into what now clearly has been a severe, but tolerable, recession - check

-- raised public opinion around the world of the United States, and appropriately is re-focusing the Middle Eastern wars to Afghanistan, working finally in comity with Pakistan with successful tactics against terrorists - check

-- passed a health care bill that is far from perfect but will cut govt expenses

So I'm curious when you say, "I have a lot of complaints about this current administration" what are they?

For the most part I agree with you. But I do agree with the previous poster in that I too have a lot of complaints about this current administration. Handling of the ACTA comes to mind, along with appointing RIAA lawyers to positions within the DoJ seems pretty scary. Their chiming in and interfering with the Joel Tenenbaum case on behalf of their former employees is repugnant to me and seems to directly contradict Obama's campaign promises about lobbyists and industry insiders role in his administration. H

since sliced bread. Easy and damned rapid to deploy, reasonably scalable, easy to modify and customize, flexible enough to build everything from a blog to an e-commerce system to a social networking platform to a cloud-based RDBMS front-end to a personal document and photos filing system.

A million things I used to do with my own C code, shell scripts, and hard drives are now done on a hosted domain using Drupal. More and more of the work I do for others just slides into Drupal by default because it's the easiest, most powerful, fastest, and most growth-capable way to accomplish it.

Spit it out man, what are you trying to say? Do you or do you not like Drupal? Damned kids, being so mysterious these days. Back in my day, you stated flat out how you felt about something. And we liked it that way.

Its easy (water and flour) and damned rapid to deploy (Little while in the oven), reasonably scalable (just need a bigger bun-cake-pan), easy to modify and customize (dough!), flexible enough to build everything from a blog (bread-log, also known as a baguette) to an e-commerce system (ancient romans often bartered with wheat) to a social networking platform (http://www.breadtalk.com/ apply to join!) to a cloud-based RDBMS front end (okay what the hell is that? You can't just make stuff up you know) to a personal document and photos filing system (Sliced bread makes great seperators, see: Club sandwhich)

Don't get me wrong, Drupal is pretty amazing, but lets not go around belittling the great invention that is sliced bread.

Taking it literally, I believe "greatest thing since sliced bread" may still indicate that sliced bread is the greatest thing, but the new thing being talked about is greater than all achievements after (since) sliced bread.

Of course, this might still imply the possibility of things greater than sliced bread existing before sliced bread...

In other words: 3 18 9 2 5 8 3 5 2 15 12 11 9 14

In the above list, 14 is the greatest element since 15. If 14 where changed to a number, say 16, then it would become the

Its easy (water and flour) and damned rapid to deploy (Little while in the oven), reasonably scalable (just need a bigger bun-cake-pan), easy to modify and customize (dough!), flexible enough to build everything from a blog (bread-log, also known as a baguette) to an e-commerce system (ancient romans often bartered with wheat) to a social networking platform (http://www.breadtalk.com/ apply to join!) to a cloud-based RDBMS front end (okay what the hell is that? You can't just make stuff up you know) to a personal document and photos filing system (Sliced bread makes great seperators, see: Club sandwhich)

Don't get me wrong, Drupal is pretty amazing, but lets not go around belittling the great invention that is sliced bread.

All of your points but your last one only had to do with bread, not specifically sliced bread. Fortunately, the greatness of sliced bread is such that it still remains a greater invention than Drupal. For evidence I present this sandwich of Perfectly Normal Beast.

But sliced bread is *less* versatile than unsliced bread. And slicing bread can be a little, meditational moment every day.

Sliced bread is not only over hyped, it is the work of the devil! The devil doesn't want you to stop and think even for a second. The devil wants you to just keep running along in the rat race./humor/truth

The 'crust' on a loaf of bread protects the bread inside, and keeps it fresh. Slicing the whole loaf just promotes early spoilage. The promotion of pre-packaged sliced bread goes hand in hand with the idea that bread needs to be pumped full of chemicals and preservatives to keep it fresh.

No, this side of the Atlantic would have involved a closed-tender process; a decision made by closed doors based on proprietary software and we'd be completely in the dark about costs, about delays, and about functionality.

Of course, one of the links there is "words, not deeds" so perhaps all the noise about open source is just that.

Indeed if you read the article you would have seen a comment by a VP at Ingres that sounds remarkably similar to the criticism from the UK commentator cited at the top of the story:

This is not the first time such platitudes have been made by the government. Over the past 12 months the office of the CIO has continually pointed to open source as the key to reducing capital expenditure on large publ

to be fair, the bit and we'd be completely in the dark about costs, about delays is not true. After a little while of project work, the newspapers would be full of stories about the delays, the costs, the extended deadlines, the additional costs and the failures of functionality.

Actually, I started to put the links in, but then I got too depressed at our government's record of IT failures. Idiots.

Really, does anyone else have doors that can make important decisions for them? It's no wonder other countries hate us for our freedoms; I'd be jealous of sentient doors if my country didn't have them! And you don't even want to know what our doors can do when their open...

"Last week hundreds of people got over a million dollars in paychecks, and others got negative values. Something about data corruption. Who is this Data and what money is he getting?"

"Why are you telling me? Call some software people and fix it. And investigate about this money thing."

"They said they it can't be fixed, the whole things needs replacing. The company that made it closed, and we have no sauce codes for it, and it will take at least a month, and cost a gazillion more to adapt with all the ot

The GPL requires copyright ownership, but work done by the Federal Government can not be copyrighted. I looked at a couple of the modules and they all include GPL v2 license. Shouldn't they be public domain?

There's no requirement that work done by the Federal Government has to be published or released. Unreleased code can be classified or avoid FOIA for various reasons, but it cannot be protected by copyright.

In this case, they actually did release code and they attached a copyright notice to it. They don't have to publish it, but if they do, they can't copyright it either.

I'm sure this is a minor oversight and the person responsible just didn't realize this. Here's some more info on copyright re: the government:

3.6) Can the government copyright its works?
This one has to be taken slowly, and we'll look at federal and state
governments separately, because the rules are different.
With one exception, works of the United States government are public
domain. 17 U.S.C. 105. The only exception is for standard reference
data produced by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce under the Standard
Reference Data Act, 15 U.S.C. 290e.
However, there's a big loophole here: while the U.S government can't get
copyright for its own works, it can have an existing copyright assigned
to it. So if the U.S. government produces a work, it's not copyrighted.
But if an independent contractor working for the government produces a
work, it is copyrighted, and nothing prevents that contractor from
assigning the copyright back to the government. This reconciles the fact
that the U.S. government can't copyright its works with the fact that if
you stay up late on weekends, you'll see Public Service Announcements
against drunk driving that say "Copyright U.S. Department of
Transportation."
Also, there are some entities that might seem to be part of the U.S.
government, but are not. For example, the U.S. Postal Service is no
longer a branch of the U.S. government. In addition, while under U.S.
control, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and organized territories
of the U.S. are not considered to be part of the U.S. government for
purposes of copyright law.

The GPL requires copyright ownership, but work done by the Federal Government can not be copyrighted. I looked at a couple of the modules and they all include GPL v2 license. Shouldn't they be public domain?

Seconded for this question. Are public domain code snapshots subject to the license in the comments or are they truly public domain? Is the code usable by for-profits without necessity for citation or adherence to the original license (like public domain print/music/artworks)? I wonder if RMS senses a disturbance in the force.

There seems to be a common perception by a lot of people that the GPL isn't just another licence agreement and that it's the same as public domain.

It's somewhat amusing looking at some code sharing sites which allow you to specify the licence. There are scores of GPL'ed ~5 line code snippets for generic algorithms the use of which would easily be excused under fair use laws making their GPL status moot.

What an insightful observation! I'd guess the developers just followed the usual procedure and attached the GPL license text.

Have other projects using the GPL had to deal with this issue? Can Drupal modules be released as "public domain" even if the rest of the code is GPL? Since the Federal Government has no copyright to transfer, it's probably not even possible for them to give the code to the Drupal developers and let them place it under the GPL or transfer the rights to the FSF.

What an insightful observation! I'd guess the developers just followed the usual procedure and attached the GPL license text.

This is one of three possibilities. The other two being, they started using the code from open sourced modules and thus are still bound by that license or they contracted the work out and the copyright was reassigned to the whitehouse, in which case they can license it.

Can Drupal modules be released as "public domain" even if the rest of the code is GPL?

Drupal modules can be closed source or have any license.

Since the Federal Government has no copyright to transfer, it's probably not even possible for them to give the code to the Drupal developers and let them place it under the GPL or transfer the rights to the FSF.

As I said, the works are either public domain (not really a bad thing) or GPL, but it all depends upon how on the ball the white house people are with regard to federal copyright laws.

Nope, the code was almost certainly produced by a contractor and thus the copyrights vests in the contractor in the first instance. The contract will require the contractor to relinquish at least some rights to the government, this typically extends to a general requirement to 'open source' the code.
GPL is actually the most restrictive open source license that is commonly used. If you are a contractor wanting to prevent other parties from selling your code in a commercial product that is not open source,

Nope, the code was almost certainly produced by a contractor and thus the copyrights vests in the contractor in the first instance.

Umm that was the third of the three options I cited. I don't see that it is by any means a certainty however. It looks like the guy running the project at the whitehouse is a coder and has employees that are the same.

. At this point the British Government has gone way beyond open source to open data.

Open protocols and formats (I assume this is what you mean) is a huge and important feature, although to say the British government has moved to it is a bit of an overstatement. I'd note that open source coding, pretty much leads to open protocols and formats because it means there is a referen

>>Nope, the code was almost certainly produced by a contractor and thus the copyrights vests in the contractor in the first instance.

>Umm that was the third of the three options I cited. I don't see that it is by any means a certainty however. It looks like the guy running the project at the whitehouse is a coder and has employees that are the same.

You posted a theory. I worked at the EOP on those systems when they were first put in.

This is one of three possibilities. The other two being, they started using the code from open sourced modules and thus are still bound by that license or they contracted the work out and the copyright was reassigned to the whitehouse, in which case they can license it.

Drupal considers modules derivative works, so modules must be licensed under the GPL. Drupal Licensing FAQ [drupal.org].
Not sure if it'd hold up in court, but thats what the Drupal community understands as their obligations.

In reply to my own question, I'd totally forgotten about VistA [vistapedia.net], the open-sourced health management system developed by the US Veterans Administration. It's in the public domain, but only available through a Freedom of Information Act request. There are commercial and non-commercial versions [vistapedia.net] of the code as well, one licensed under the GPL and one using the Eclipse license.

The GPL requires copyright ownership, but work done by the Federal Government can not be copyrighted. I looked at a couple of the modules and they all include GPL v2 license. Shouldn't they be public domain?

The part added by the government can't be copyrighted, but if they are derivative of GPL code, the original copyright holder still has copyright on that.

The new Whitehouse site was developed by a team of private contractors including Acquia, Phase 2 Technologies, and General Dynamics IT. The modules are posted to Drupal.org by staff from Acquia and Phase 2, so I would assume they hold the copyrights.

My company worked with Phase 2 on a Drupal site and the contract did make provisions for them to retain the copyright of certain kinds of work.

Until this administration, hasn't the White House been a 100% MSFT shop? Somehow the U.S. Navy manages to stay afloat with many systems running Windows server OS. Then again the Navy can afford to have lots of people massaging/patching/rebooting the Windows boxes 24x7.

Although I applaud this because at least the federal government didn't waste gobs of money on a proprietary system that might not be around tomorrow, I still can't help but yawn at this news. This has nothing to do with the President or probably even his CTO that he nominated. It was probably just some developer that the federal government has hired who recommended the use of Drupal and suggested open sourcing the modules that they developed.

...I still can't help but yawn at this news.... It was probably just some developer that the federal government has hired who recommended the use of Drupal and suggested open sourcing the modules that they developed.

True, but the interesting thing I think is that the people that the developer has the contract with took the suggestion, ran it through a government staff, and got the idea approved. A staff that gains nothing (directly) by giving the code away, has to take the time to understand the implications of their decision (since they'll be on CNN and fired if they do something dumb), and would normally consider something like this a security risk by default.

So I think it's fairly groundbreaking for a government bureacracy. And it gives the rest of government a precedent to use when having a similar discussion with their bosses.

This has nothing to do with the President or probably even his CTO that he nominated. It was probably just some developer that the federal government has hired who recommended the use of Drupal and suggested open sourcing the modules that they developed.

I'm curious as to why you think that. Is it because you have information we don't or do you just have a bias against the current administration so you mentally refuse to assign credit to them for acts you approve of?

In case you're interested in reality, this project was the baby of David Cole, a well known Drupal developer and OSS supporter who was appointed by Obama to several positions in the White House technical staff (currently senior advisor to the CIO) and who previously worked as data analyst for th

Wow, read into my post a little more why don't you? Geez, can't a guy have a non-political opinion about a technical decision?

You made the following assertion:

This has nothing to do with the President or probably even his CTO that he nominated.

I asked why you believed what you believed and what basis in fact you had for forming that belief. If you're going to make assertions, surely they should have some basis. Asserting the president had nothing to do with something is not just an opinion, it's making a claim and was presented as a statement of fact. Is your decision making process so broken you can't even answer a question as to how you come by your opinions?

Let's do that then:Trustbird [trustedbird.org] is a project led by the French Gendarmerie (a kind of police) in order to add military cryptography and chain-of-command features into thunderbird. It has been released publicly.

Ahhh... I used to live and work in France, and dealt with the DGA a couple of times. I had not thought such a nasty outfit - they ARE arms dealers, after all - to make such a move. I am nicely surprised.

Actually one hand does not know what the other does. Open source acceptance is not widespread in French public offices, but when one does manage to keep lobbies at bay, these kind of initiatives happen.

It's always amusing to see ignorant Americans ridicule the French, even though the French have known warfare for thousands of years longer than America has even existed.

When the French have seen war, it has been on their own soil most of the time. They have seen entire generations fight to the death for their freedom, and that's only within the past hundred years. Meanwhile, America has barely even been scratched on its home soil. Pearl Harbor wasn't even on mainland America, but thousands of miles away. And during some battles of WWI, the French would lose a number of soldiers and civilians every 10 minutes of fighting equivalent to that of the American losses on 9/11.

The French have shown more valor, bravery and courage under fire than America ever has. The French are true warriors, and true defenders of freedom.

No one who has studied warfare doubts the French soldiers. The French leaders, on the other hand, tend to be panic-stricken, egotistical and unwilling to believe the reality in front of them. Which is why France has the reputation for surrender that it does: it's not the soldiers, but the leaders, who fall apart.

The French have shown more valor, bravery and courage under fire than America ever has. The French are true warriors, and true defenders of freedom.

OK, you love France, I get it, but I can't let bullshit like that slide. In French history, when Frenchman wasn't killing Frenchman, they teamed up to invade foreigners. Napoleon was the Hitler of the 18th century, lest you forget. Under fire, France has been unimpressive, with a largely conscript army that lacked real morale and discipline, and this is cons

The rights gained in the French revolution? Those rights were quite late and only really helped people on paper. That's even overlooking the massive bloodbath that was the French revolution and the notorious instability of French republics. When England had a more liberal Bill of Rights a hundred years earlier and America had just ratified a very progressive Bill of Rights, colour me unimpressed with the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" -- especially as it didn't help the average Man in the street too muc

France was a Major Power in May 1940, and before the end of June it had surrendered.

To be fair, that would have happened to any of the world powers at the time, provided that the areas attacked weren't too large.

First of all, Germany had built up a huge war machine.Secondly they rewrote the rulebook on how you manage an offensive war. They didn't stop for anything, including supplies. It wasn't called Blitzkrieg (lightning war) [wikipedia.org] for nothing.Thirdly, the German army at the time was at a pretty significant tec

Transparent mirroring is of course only one way among many to use drupal (or any other cms) securely. It is my impression that the current US administration actually allows hiring someone with a higher IQ than the president, so someone probably did a google search. [lmgtfy.com]